>>> [!note] Migrated issue <!-- Drupal.org comment --> <!-- Migrated from issue #1477882. --> Reported by: [Matthew Davidson](https://www.drupal.org/user/52996) >>> <p>When I first came across this module, no work had been done on it for the best part of a year, and changes to core and Entity API in the meantime had left it pretty broken. I've addressed enough of these to make it useful for my own projects, but it's really just differently broken at the moment, and a generally useful 1.0 release will need some more work.</p> <p>Also in the last year, other projects have come along which have the potential to make Micro more lightweight, maintainable, and focused. <a href="http://drupal.org/project/eck">Entity Construction Kit</a> looks like dealing with some of the more complex use cases for which one might have used Micro, and a lot of the code currently in this module (particularly Views integration, which I mostly broke with a schema change) duplicates what <a href="http://drupal.org/project/entityreference">Entity Reference</a> now provides.</p> <p>I'm currently in the process of rewriting the original "attaches to other entities" functionality to leverage Entity Reference, and if you look at the remaining hard-coded properties of the micro entity type:</p> <ul> <li>'uid' could be an optional Entity reference to a user, defaulting to the current user at micro creation.</li> <li>'created' could be an optional <a href="http://drupal.org/project/date">Date</a> field, defaulting to the current time at micro creation. Also we could make a date field optionally an "updated" field by just overwriting the value with the current time whenever the entity is saved.</li> </ul> <p>That leaves the only hard coded properties of the Micro entity type as Micro ID and Micro Type; lightweight indeed! If your use case is "I just want a fieldable thing" and you don't necessarily want it associated with other entity types, you can; just don't use Entity Reference in that way (or at all). Similarly, if you don't need a created date, it's not required.</p> <p>Much of the functionality originally envisaged can be layered on top, as additions to the Entity Reference field settings form. i.e. A entity reference field targeting users might have a checkbox asking whether this field should be treated as an author field. Or more generally an entity reference field could optionally expose lists of "attached" micro items in the target entity's content, as a block, or as a tab (MENU_LOCAL_TASK menu item). These lists might be overridable views, or if we don't want a dependency on Views maybe an <a href="http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--entity.inc/class/EntityFieldQuery/7">EntityFieldQuery</a> optionally overridable by a view. Also settings to include an "Add a..." link (MENU_LOCAL_ACTION menu item) to the target entity type's page can be put here.</p> <p>Another thing I'd like to do is pull out the Admin UI into a separate module, so that Micro types can be included in <a href="http://drupal.org/project/features">Features</a> without cluttering up sites that will never want to modify them.</p> <p>So the requirements for a 1.0-alpha1 release are:</p> <ul> <li><span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-7"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/micro/issues/1477958" title="Status: Closed (fixed)">#1477958: Shift "attached to" functionality to optional Entity Reference field</a></span></li> <li>Shift authorship to optional Entity Reference field.</li> <li>Shift created property to optional Date field.</li> <li>Move admin UI to separate module, replacing form elements currently in the "Add micro type" with elements added to Entity Reference and Date field settings forms for micro field instances.</li> </ul> <h3>Update 6th June 2012<br> <h3> </h3></h3><p>The above are completed, in a rough-and-ready kind of way, but I want to add one more task:</p> <ul> <li><span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-7"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/micro/issues/1618484" title="Status: Closed (fixed)">#1618484: Default display methods for list of micros from a referenced entity.</a></span></li> </ul> <h3>Update 14th June 2012<br> <h3> </h3></h3><p><a href="https://www.drupal.org#comment-6115588">Micro 7.x-1.0-alpha1!</a></p>